This section is intended to provide a background or context to the disclosure recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
It is generally known to provide a hand operated cutting tool for use in pruning or trimming branches and the like, such as a lopper having a pair of pivoting members such as handles that actuate cutting jaws that cooperate to capture and sever a branch between the jaws. Such known loppers typically include a pair of handles pivotally movable between an open and closed position for actuating the cutting jaws between a full open and closed position. The known loppers may also include devices intended to increase the available leverage provided by the handles, including levers and/or gears that transmit and increase a force from the handles to the jaws.
As a lopper cuts through an object (e.g. a roughly cylindrical sample of a wood material), the force required to cut increases up to a maximum, at a location approximately sixty percent through the sample, then decreases at a generally similar rate until approximately ninety to ninety-five percent through the sample where the force required to complete the cutting operation rapidly decreases. Typical cutting tools such as a lopper are sized such that with the tool fully opened, the average human holds the handles with arms abducted and elbows facing outward, and move with a transverse flexion of the arms until the tool is fully closed. There is a reduction in the transverse flexion strength as the arms are abducted and elbows straightened, which tends to result in a changing force available from the user where the force required to cut the object is increasing.
In comparison to a two-hand operated cutting tool such as a lopper, one-hand operated cutting tools are typically controlled via a single hand of an operator. For example, pruners and scissors are typically held in a palm of an operator. However, like the two-hand operated cutting tools, the one-hand operated cutting tools typically include a pair of handles that can be actuated to move a pair of cutting members to cut through an object of the tool.